One of the "hypothesis laboriously taking shape" is certainly the C14 dating on samples of the linen cloth. Nothing will therefrom emerge on how the image came out, but the Christological hypothesis were impaired, shoud the Shroud be significantly post-dated. Already long since suggested, but never consented by Curia of Turin inasmuch as destructive procedure, the C14 dating was evenutally carried out in 1988, when few tiny fragments of the linen were enough to. The nuclear laboratories of Oxford UK (Hedges and Hall), Zürich (Wölfli) and Tucson Arizona (Donahue and Diamon) were charged with the task. Many people at that time resigned or excited by the Christological hypothesis, a bomb exploded: with a maximum error of a couple of centuries in plus or minus, the Shroud came out to be a handwork of the late Middle Ages.

The issue triggered complex, polemical after-effects, by far more passionate and often instrumentalized than scientific. The reliability of the results and even the good faith of the scientists were seriously questioned, and the three institutions had to admit, not without embarrassment, that during the tests many things had not gone the right way through; and that had been disregarded the preliminary agreements requested by the Curia of Turin, as the premises of every one of them working independently during the progress of analysis. What an astonishment! In that everybody's frenzy followed the 1978 STURP studies, an utter libido sciendi, no one had realized that the C14 test was totally unreliable from the beginning on an object that, as the Shroud, had passed during the centuries through two if not three fires and the related water of extinction, countless manipulatings, such as a massive mending after fire of 1532 just to mention one, several transfers and ostensions in the oper air - all historically documented - with the obvious pollutions of any kind! But even more surprising is the fact, recognized by one of three scientists as debilitating to the survey, that the fragment examined was contaminated and/or basically extraneous to main tissue of the Shroud, being of the cotton fabric used as mending by the nuns of Chambéry in 1534!

The american chemist Raymond N. Rogers, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and considered a leading expert in thermal analysis, has pubblished a study (in english, available here) where since very first words he affirms:

"Pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry results from the sample area coupled with microscopic and microchemical observations prove that the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin. The radiocarbon date was thus not valid for determining the true age of the Shroud".

On the carbon test, do consent me a marginal note: supposing the Shroud was really made in the Middle Ages, its mistery, far from cleared, would become even hazier, since the Christological origin of the image, as we have seen, is by far the only not absurde. And let's go through the second question: